


Christmas in the TARDIS

by weakinteraction



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Christmas Decorations, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 18:58:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5259992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are an infinite number of Christmases touching the Vortex, technically speaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas in the TARDIS

**Author's Note:**

  * For [human_nature (AllyHR)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllyHR/gifts).



Romana pushed the door to the console room open with her back while keeping the large box the Doctor had asked her to carry perfectly balanced, thanks to both her cellular level proprioception and innate understanding of the laws of physics.

When she turned around, though, nothing could stop her from dropping the box in shock. It clattered to the floor, the Dalek sensor spheres inside jostling against each other.

"Doctor! K9! Come quick!"

The sight before her was one that still haunted her nightmares, even in this new body, even after she had seen so much in her travels with the Doctor. They had arrived all over Gallifrey, including the Academy, suddenly and shockingly imposing themselves on what should have been an inviolable sanctuary even within the impregnable domain that was the citadel of the Time Lords.

K9 whirred into the console room. "Mistress?"

"There's a Vardan trying to transduct into the TARDIS," she said, pointing to the shimmering apparition. "Quick! Blast it!"

"Affirmative, Mistress," K9 said.

Romana ducked behind the console as K9 fired. The explosion was messier than she had anticipated: everything was covered in small silvery strands and fragments of green that almost seemed like vegetation. She had expected that K9's laser would simply overload the Vardan's carrier signal.

Before she could ponder this curious turn of events any further, the Doctor walked in with the lights he had gleefully stripped out of the old fault indicator they had found down a side corridor on the way back from the storage room. "K9! Did you blow up my Christmas tree?"

"Affirmative, Master." He pirouetted round to face the Doctor. "I was acting on Mistress Romana's orders, Master."

"Romana! Did you order K9 to blow up my Christmas tree?"

"Possibly," Romana admitted. "There may have been a minor case of mistaken identity."

"Mistress Romana believed that the Christmas tree was a Vardan in mid-transduction."

The Doctor tilted his head slightly, considering. "Do you think I used too much tinsel?"

"Affirmative, Master."

"Why are we decorating the TARDIS anyway?" Romana asked.

The Doctor scratched his ear, the string of lights trailing from his hand as he did so. "Well," he said, "it's always Christmas at some point in the space-time continuum."

"Well, yes, that's axiomatic," Romana said. "There are an infinite number of Christmases touching the Vortex, technically speaking."

"An infinite number?" the Doctor said earnestly. "Then we simply _have_ to celebrate one of them now."

Romana persisted. "But why should we be celebrating this strange Earth tradition at all?"

"Why shouldn't we?" the Doctor countered. "Here, Romana, hold this." He passed her one end of the fault indicator lights and she looked at it, then up at him, as though . "Even if we haven't got a tree any more, we can still spruce things up a bit." Romana followed as he walked over to the scanner screen and draped the lights over the top of it. She took the other end and suspended it over the roundels between the screen and the door.

"Is hanging lights supposed to make me understand?"

"Axial tilt, Romana," the Doctor said.

"Axial tilt?"

"The _Earth's_ axial tilt. Earth has a very pronounced axial tilt, almost three times the galactic average."

"I may not have visited the planet as often as you, but that was quite obvious."

"It makes for _seasons_ , Romana. Significant variation in insolation between different points in the planet's orbit, especially at high latitude." The Doctor carried on talking as he dragged his end of the string of lights around the perimeter of the console room. "Most of the Christmas traditions are really about midwinter, about the days getting longer, _light_ coming back ..."

"I see. And how are you proposing to turn these particular lights on?" Romana asked.

"That's a very good question," the Doctor said. "K9, can your auxiliary power output interface with these?"

"Negative," K9 said, though Romana suspected he was simply preserving his dignity. Spending the next twelve days -- the Doctor had been quite insistent that they had to do a full twelve days -- stuck in the console room wired up to a string of lights was hardly the sort of thing a sophisticated mobile AI unit should be spending its time doing.

"Well, that's a pity." The Doctor looked crestfallen for a moment, but then grinned. "Did you bring the baubles, Romana?"

"The baubles?" Romana thought for a moment. "Oh, you mean the Dalek sensor spheres." She found the box where it had landed on the floor earlier and opened it.

"Dalek sensor spheres?" the Doctor said, indignant, as he walked over. "These are--" He broke off as he picked up one from the box himself. "Romana, they _are_ Dalek sensor spheres. We can still hang them up, though, or we could, if we still had the tree."

Romana tried her best to look pained for the Doctor's behalf, but she didn't really have many regrets apart from the fact that the console room was covered in messy strands of extruded polymers. "You know, I'm sure we can do better at decorating the TARDIS," she said brightly. "After all this is all a bit crude, isn't it?"

The Doctor put on his best affronted look. "Crude? Crude? I'll have you know that was premium tinsel from the Marble Arch branch of Marks and Spencer in 1971 ... Until K9 blew it up, anyway."

"I'm quite sure it was the finest 'tinsel' humanity ever created," Romana said soothingly. "I mean in general, physically manipulating the environment to decorate it is a very basic way of going about things, when we could simply use block transfer computations."

Romana crossed to the architectural configuration controls and set to work. The floor beneath them lit up in irregularly shaped blocks of colour -- red, green, silver and gold -- stretching out across the floor, tessellating without repetition.

"A Penrose tiling?" The Doctor sounded reluctantly impressed.

"Stretching throughout the TARDIS without ever repeating itself," Romana said. "And coloured as a four colour map. In what are apparently traditional Christmas decoration colours."

"Well, now you're just showing off," the Doctor said, but she could tell he was trying to hide that he was impressed.

"Do you want me to change it back to boring old grey?"

"I didn't say that." The Doctor looked at her with a gleam in his eye. "What else can you do?"

Romana's fingers flew across the keyboard some more. When she had finished, she activated the scanner screen on an internal monitoring circuit. It whirred to life beneath the still stubbornly unlit lights.

"I say," the Doctor said when he looked up at what the scanner was showing, "that is rather good."

Romana had made some minor adjustments to the secondary console room. A large fir tree -- decorated in a tasteful Victorian style -- stood in the corner furthest from the scanner screen and the door, and each roundel in the second row down from the ceiling had a wreath placed concentrically inside it. Every flat surface, apart from the time rotor itself, was festooned with candles glowing faintly. The Penrose tiling extended across the floor here too, but in keeping with the overall theme of the room, was a mosaic.

"Yes, very festive," the Doctor said. "Almost ... Dickensian. Well done, Romana. It just needs one more thing." He walked up to the console and she moved aside to allow him access to the controls, curious to see what he thought she had omitted. From her point of view, she had subtly interlocked a number of pleasing geometric patterns while adhering to the room's existing ambience. She was fairly certain that whatever the Doctor was about to do was only going to ruin it.

When the Doctor finished, she decided she had been right. "Doctor, why is there a single rather bedraggled piece of vegetation hanging over the entrance?"

"Ahhh," the Doctor said, tapping his nose mysteriously.

Romana rolled her eyes and pushed him out of the way and reverse engineered the commands he had issued to summon it into existence. A few quick cross-references with the TARDIS Index File later, and she was reading from the screen: "Mistletoe. Earth vegetation subtype. Generic common name for hemiparasitic plants of the order Santalales." She scrolled quickly past the full genome and simplistic biodata analysis until she found the part that explained the relevance to Christmas. "Cultural symbolism. In Norse mythology--" She scrolled again, more slowly this time. "Ah ha! Symbol of fertility and vitality, possibly associated with the parasitic plant maintaining photosynthesis year round while its host--" She scrolled just a little more. "A popular tradition on Earth in the 19th to 22nd centuries of one local calendar was for people to kiss when under the mistletoe." She turned to look at him, putting in an effort to look more shocked than she actually felt. "Doctor!"

The Doctor's attempt to look innocent was about as convincing as that of a Time Tot caught applying Zeno's Paradox to a local spacetime pocket. Before Romana could take him to task, however, the lights above the scanner screen started to flicker on. "Well done, K9!" the Doctor said with the over-ebullience of someone very keen to change the subject.

"Negative, Master, this is not my doing." And as if to prove that he wasn't attached to anything, K9 whirred his way quickly round the console.

"Doctor, those are the lights from the fault indicator, aren't they?" Romana said slowly, as an unpleasant suspicion formed in the back of her mind; a suspicion which was only reinforced by K9's erratic behaviour.

"Yes," the Doctor said. And then, "Ah. Yes. I see."

"Multiple system failures in progress," K9 said. "Emergency!"

"Yes, yes, K9!" said the Doctor, as Romana said "We know!" They circled the console in opposite directions, quickly checking readouts and dials before meeting again at the other side.

"It's bad, Romana," the Doctor said.

"I know," said Romana. "These readings are completely contradictory."

"They don't make any sense at all," the Doctor agreed.

"Emergency," K9 chipped in unhelpfully.

"What _is_ going on?" Romana asked the Doctor after looking at the stubbornly nonsensical readouts another time.

"Your guess is as good as mine," the Doctor said.

"We'll have to make an emergency landing," Romana said. "Shut down all non-essential systems until we can isolate the fault and then make repairs." Her hands flew over the controls. "Materialising ... now."

The TARDIS reintegrated with real space with even more of a bump than usual. The fault indicator lights strung around the room remained stubbornly on. "Well, at least the old girl looks festive," the Doctor said. "Let's see where we are, shall we?"

"That hardly seems necessary, Doctor. We have all the--" But the Doctor was already activating the doors. They struggled open slowly with an alarming grinding noise.

Outside, a snow-covered street was filled with humans going about the borderline-incomprehensible rituals of their consumerist belief system, lit by the bright window displays of the temples, or "shops". So dedicated were they to the Hunt for the Best Bargain that they seemed for the most part not to have noticed the TARDIS materialising at all. The exception was a lone male human who looked rather inebriated, who suddenly peered into the TARDIS. Romana worried for a moment how his fragile mental state would take a glimpse of the truths of higher dimensional metamathics, but he merely smiled and shouted, "Merry Christmas!"

"Er, yes, Merry Christmas," Romana replied.

"And a Happy New Year," the Doctor shouted with a wide grin.

Romana reached across the console to close the doors again. They screeched even more unpleasantly than they had when opening. The Doctor turned to her with a grin. "It's just like you said, Romana. It's always Christmas somewhere in the Vortex! Shall we go outside for some wassailing?"

"I really think repairing the TARDIS ought to be our first priority," Romana said, taking out her sonic screwdriver.

The Doctor looked at her. She could see, passing silently across his face in a few moments of exaggerated expressions, all the different arguments he might use to try and persuade her otherwise. They would mostly have revolved around asking about the location of particular personal qualities of hers, such as a "sense of adventure" or, worse still in this particular case, "Christmas spirit", which she thought highly overrated. After a few moments, however, without having actually vocalised any of them, she could see that he realised that she wasn't going to back down, and settled on his "resigned to taking the sensible option". She smiled at him before crouching down beneath the console to start checking the circuits.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the Doctor extract his own screwdriver and cross to the roundels on the wall, detaching them in turn to examine the subsystems hidden inside.

It only took a few minutes for Romana to locate the source of the problem. "Doctor, you'd better come and take a look at this."

The Doctor got down beside her and looked up at the point on the underside of the console that she was indicating with her screwdriver. "There's something in the primary internal data links," he observed. "Almost ... gumming it up."

"I ... think it may be some sort of polymer composite that's been vaporised and recondensed," Romana said quietly.

"Looks like," the Doctor said. He hadn't realised quite yet. "Oh!" he said. Now he had. "This is what's left of the Christmas tree, isn't it?"

"I'm rather afraid it might be," Romana said. "The Christmas tree and the tinsel," she added, her scientific curiosity not completely overwhelmed by her sense of guilt. "The silver in it must be what's making it conductive, which is why it can interfere so badly with the circuits."

"Dratted premium tinsel," the Doctor said. "I knew I should have got the cheap stuff." He thought for a moment. "That would explain why all the fault indicator lights came on. Even systems that aren't being affected directly are probably receiving spurious data and deciding that they must have a fault." He took another moment to consider. "But only if data was actively being sent--"

"The floor," Romana said, unwilling to drag her misery out any longer. "I sent an architectural update to the entire TARDIS. I'm rather afraid, Doctor, that all of this is my fault."

"Well, never mind," the Doctor said. "No use crying over vaporised tinsel, is there?" He started to pull cables one by one out of the console above them, using his screwdriver to resonate the polymer away. It dripped to the floor as a dark green sludge with occasional silver flecks.

As she began work beside him, Romana allowed herself a small smile. As soon as she had seen the problem, she had worked out everything the Doctor just had, and his likely reaction. She had expected him to have a flash of anger, and then make fun at her expense for days, and the latter prediction might still come true, but his initial response had been much calmer than she had expected. It was nice to get the occasional piece of evidence that he cared about her, better still for it to come in a non-life-threatening situation.

Romana made a decision.

"It occurs to me, Doctor," she said, as the ever-increasing numbers of cables dangling from the console started to tangle up with each other, "that crossed computers are as much a symbol of ... fertility for Time Lords as mistletoe is for humans."

"Yes, well, one doesn't usually like to think about the old duffers in the Capitol in terms of fertility," the Doctor said. "But I suppose you're not wrong, in a manner of speaking." He stopped what he was doing and looked at her with a slightly alarmed look. "Why?"

"You're not an old duffer, Doctor, however much you might like to affect an air of unworldliness."

"Affect an air, well I've never heard--"

Romana cut across him. "And I'm definitely not."

"Well, I never said you were."

"And here we are, under what I think could definitely be construed as crossed computers." She arched her eyebrows in the direction of the cables above them.

The Doctor cleared his throat. "Ah. Yes."

"I've decided you're right, Doctor," she said. "It's time to embrace some of these human traditions you enjoy." And before he had time to work out exactly what she was talking about, she leaned across and kissed him on the cheek. "Merry Christmas, Doctor," she whispered in his ear.


End file.
